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Abstract
One of the conclusions of Inglehart's work is that postmaterialism leads to higher rates of political action. Particularly, postmaterialists are opposed to the established social order and support citizen input in government decisions in a horizontal way. These attitudes would be associated with unconventional political participation. The objective of this article is to examine to what extent this holds true in the Spanish case in the period 1980–2000. The authors' analysis reveals that in Spain there has not been a systematic rejection of electoral participation as a result of the rise of postmaterialism. Nevertheless, postmaterialists are more likely to engage in unconventional participation and participation in new associations.
Notes
[1] The authors would like to express their thanks for the comments made by the reviewers and the editors, especially by Marina Costa Lobo. Also, many thanks to Eva Anduiza and Agustí Bosch for their always valuable suggestions.
[2] The surveys used for the analyses are the Spanish samples of the four waves of the World and/or European Values Surveys available: Wave 1—year 1981 (1 sample, n = 2303), Wave 2—year 1990 (2 samples, n = 4147), Wave 3—year 1995 (1 sample, n = 1211) and Wave 4—years 1999—2000 (2 samples, n = 2409). The main multivariate analyses are conducted with the 2000 sample of the fourth wave (n = 1209), as these are the most recent data where postmaterialism is measured with 12 items.
[3] ASEP is a private firm chaired by prof. Juan Díez Nicolás, author of the main studies on postmaterialism in Spain. Under the name ‘The Public Opinion of Spaniards’ ASEP has conducted since 1986 a monthly survey with a representative sample of the Spanish population 18 and more years old of both sexes. The interview method is a personal face-to-face interview. The sample size is 1200 individuals for every monthly survey (stratified random sample with proportional fixing). The questionnaire includes a section that is repeated every month, allowing comparisons in time. ASEP, in collaboration with JDSystems, is a member of the World Values Survey project, being in charge of the official data archives for past and future surveys by WVS and EVS organisations respectively in Spain. More details and some data are available online at: http://www.jdsurvey.net/jds/jdsurveyAnalisis.jsp. For our analysis we have taken annual averages.
[4] A variable of voting intention usually overestimates the level of electoral participation.
[5] As our dependent variable is a dichotomous one, we opted for logistic regression (Long & Freese 2006).
[6] To avoid the curvilinear effect detected between age and electoral participation, we have opted to distinguish between groups for this variable (18 to 24 years, 25 to 34 years and over 35 years). Dichotomous variables have been created for each group and the variable relative to the over-35s has been excluded as a reference category.
[7] See more details about variables included in the models in Appendix 1.
[8] Our analysis does not reveal a significant relationship between ideological self placement and voting intention, although recent analyses have demonstrated a progressive demobilisation of left-oriented citizens (Barreiro Citation2002). However, as Barreiro argues (Citation2002), the ideological variable has lost part of its impact on voting decision among left-oriented individuals. Instead, other contextual factors such as government support, the assessment of the political situation or issue positioning would be better predictors of the abstention of these electors (or their vote for the right-wing party governing in Spain between 1996 and 2004, the Popular Party).
[9] Following Dalton (Citation2002) and for simplifying purposes we will refer to them as unconventional participation. But we assume the position of Torcal et al. (Citation2006) when they argue that the classical distinction between conventional and unconventional forms of participation is nowadays too limited and outdated. Rather, any typology of political participation should include a category for activities related to consumerism and other extra-representative forms of action (typically qualified as protest) in opposition to institutionalised participation such as voting or party activities. All of our variables could be included in such a category of extra-representative activities.
[10] As this is a count variable, it cannot have negative values. Nor does it have a normal distribution and, as has been seen, the highest frequencies accumulate around the lower values, especially 0. Linear methods were not therefore considered advisable. Rather, a negative binomial regression was considered more suitable. This method is based on the Poisson distribution but it introduces a corrective parameter (alpha) in order not to underestimate the probability of occurrence of the lower values on the index (Long & Freese 2006). To test the suitability of this method compared with the original Poisson models, we carried out a likelihood-ratio test which gave significant results (chi-squared 37.56, p < 0.01).
[11] The negative binomial regression shows the following data for the postmaterialism variable: coefficient of 0.07, standard error of 0.053 and p>0.05. Likelihood-ratio chi-squared = 118.01, p < 0.01, Nagelkerke R2 = 0.059 with n = 927.
[12] Factor analysis of principal components with a varimax rotation. Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sample adequacy = 0.782. Bartlett's Test of Sphericity: chi-squared = 2193.23, df = 91, p < 0.01.